USEFUL INVENTION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 July 1940, Page 6

USEFUL INVENTION

DUE TO CHINESE PUZZLE. YOUNG WOMAN'S INITIATIVE. From a Chinese puzzle hundreds of years old sprang an invention which provides the livelihood of Miss Vivien Kellems, of New Jersey, U.S.A., and her two brothers, and which was responsible for Miss Kellems being one of the only three women members of the Institute of American Electrical Engineers. The puzzle is a tube which, if one puts a finger into each of its open ends, holds them there. The invention is a tubular wiremesh cable grip for pulling and drawing steel and rope cables, gripping sunken piles. It was perfected by one of Miss Kellems’s brothers 12 years ago. Miss Kellems was so impressed with the possibilities of the invention that she started a factory, with her brother and one wire-weaver. Now she controls the firm which has been responsible, among other things, for pulling all the wire used in such projects as the huge Chrysler building in New York, the Boulder Dam (1800 miles of wire were pulled by the grips there) and the whole of the British electrical grid system. I have just met Miss Kellems in London. She is fair-haired, attractive and essentially feminine. In her spare time she collects old clocks and breeds English cocker spaniels. Before she began her present work she took three college degrees, none of them connected with engineering, but it was she, not her brother, who saw the big possibilities in his designs. “I can weave wire myself." she told me, “and have taught each of our employees. men and women, how to do their jobs. “I am absolutely fascinated by the work. When we began it was I who called on all the engineering executives and got them interested.” Now every U.S.A, firm that needs cables pulled uses products of the firm. She “bought up" her only rival some years ago.